Straight Talk For Teens By Teens

I’m so glad you asked this question! I’ve poured everything I’ve got into a modern music college and I’ve had to ask myself: Why do I love music and what do I want to accomplish with it? For me, music is all there is. Many talented people today don’t go all the way; they record a song or an album to fit the mold of what’s popular. But our parent’s music completely CHANGED the mold, and that’s what made people travel as far as they did. There are many bands today that I love, but Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Beatles, The Stones, they were legends then, and still are today. I doubt many of today’s musicians will become legends. Our parents lived in a different atmosphere, there was a different passion coming from the performers.

Old rock is GOD. I wouldn’t travel hundreds of miles for today’s music. And rap is only slightly more amazing than bottled water. It doesn’t encompass the entirety of a person. You can’t hear the emotion coming through; feelings are either missing or deadpan. The 60’s through The Grateful Dead, that’s when people played music because it oozed from them, not because it gave them a big paycheck. It was sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll. Now it’s sex, drugs and money. Big difference.

Yes, we really do love our music. We listen to it all the time and play it on our own instruments as much as is humanly possible! But for me and many of my friends, our favorite music is not from our generation. Metallica, Guns ‘n Roses, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen are well-loved, even worshipped as rock gods. Driving distances to hear music happens less often because CD and MP3 recordings are usually higher quality than live.

I took my mom to Def Leppard recently and got to see some of that era come back to her. I travel far for the right show, even if it is my parent’s music.

My taste in music changes with my mood. Indie and country are my feel-good genres, slow country my sad genre, screamo when I’m mad, rap or R&B when I’m excited. Because of money, I don’t go to extremes to see live music. Plus, many singers today are so edited, they are horrible live.

Rap is my favorite music and Eminem is my favorite rapper. The music is visual, it’s not sad or emotionally questioning. It pumps me up and causes ideas to pop into my head.

It’s hard to prove we love our music because this is the digital age and we don’t have to drive hundreds of miles to hear great sound. My favorite music is rap, which is from my generation. But a lot of my generation denies liking rap, and I think that’s because they have to defend liking it because so much of the hip hop scene supports gang culture, like with 50 Cent, where it’s all about money, crime and bashing women. But there is some really good rap out there, like from Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West, that doesn’t need defending. It’s intellectual and cerebral and gets you thinking about societal issues. That’s the kind of rap I like. It’s about ideas.